DURBAN - Instagram will be testing a feature that will give shopping businesses the ability to run their existing shopping posts as ads in Ads Manager.
People love to use Instagram to browse, explore and shop from businesses directly from the app. Over the past few years, the social networking app has created organic shopping features to make it easier for people to discover and shop.
Now, there's more than 130 million accounts tapping to reveal tags from Instagram Shopping posts every month.
A few selected businesses will now be able to test this experience in feed. Running the shopping posts as ads provides the same experience people know and love. Shoppers that tap on these ads will be taken to a product description page within Instagram and can proceed to purchase from the business' mobile site.
Instagram is excited to test this new ads experience with businesses. With these ads, businesses can reach their target audience and scale, showcase products through the shopping format and move people through the path to purchase with an experience so many Instagrammers are already familiar with.
Instagram said that this is just the first step in experimenting with shopping posts as ads and they will be monitoring community sentiment throughout the testing period.
In the future, Instagram plans to build and test checkout as part of these ads, making it easier for people to shop on Instagram.